Today Bloomberg Business reported the statistics behind a trend already well known to manufacturers and construction contractors: The good times are back! In the second quarter the US economy grew at a very healthy 3.9% annualized rate on the back of exceptional growth in manufacturing and ...

It goes without saying that railroads want their vendors to be as efficient as possible. New industry practices now indicate that vendors may need to engage in lean practices to sustain their customer relationships. As railroads work to improve their own maintenance efficiency and... more ...

The central premise of lean manufacturing is the elimination of waste in all parts of the value chain. Waste comes in many forms, and redundant work is high on the list. One of the most frequent patterns of redundant work occurs in record-keeping. With paper systems, information is collected on a ...

As we meet with manufacturers of precast and pre-stressed concrete we are often asked: "Can we set up a concrete product tracking system without using RFID tags?" The answer is yes. We have a few customers that are doing just that. In fact, they are integrating precast product tracking with their ...

In our work with state Departments of Transportation and a Class 1 railroad we have seen many reasons why infrastructure asset owners want RFID tracking to be included with the precast concrete structures they purchase. Not surprisingly, this is always for want of better information and greater ...

It has been said many times that a successful lean practice requires a culture of lean thinking. This culture must be nurtured within leadership, throughout the organization and, ultimately, across the supply chain. The first step in this process is learning; the second is trial; and the third is ...

As the construction industry embraces lean practices to provide greater customer value and reduce waste, one would expect to find new technology applications that support the process. We did a search and found mixed results. There are some applications well known to the industry (BIM, for example), ...

In the early 1990s the construction industry became aware that cost overruns and delays were caused by the longstanding and antiquated construction management model in practice. At that time a group of leading thinkers coalesced and formed the International Group for Lean Construction to develop ...

Last Friday we posted about the once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure construction opportunity resulting from the $57 trillion global investment that analysts expect through 2030. We noted, however, that it won't be "business as usual" because the public sector is embracing lean practices to stretch ...